


I Was Measuring The Emptiness

by not_whelmed_yet



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gods & Goddesses, Awkward Romance, F/F, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, Study Date, does this make sense? no, nonesense worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-16
Updated: 2020-02-16
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:54:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22756615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/not_whelmed_yet/pseuds/not_whelmed_yet
Summary: For the 2020 Transformers Femslash exchange!Velocity is a goddess who couldn't ascend and is stuck in her temple, dreaming of being a medic. Nautica is a mech looking for a quiet place to read a book. Could a chance encounter between them change everything?
Relationships: Nautica/Velocity
Comments: 20
Kudos: 25





	I Was Measuring The Emptiness

**Author's Note:**

> For Nyausgris. I've written you a short poem to apologize for how little resembles the prompt you requested (with apologies to William Carlos Williams). I hope you enjoy this nonetheless.
> 
> This Is Just To Say
> 
> I have written  
> a fic  
> that strayed far  
> from from the
> 
> prompt, which  
> you were probably  
> hoping  
> to receive
> 
> Forgive me  
> I was longing  
> for a goddess  
> Velocity
> 
> P.S. I wrote this whole fic while listening to the song My Ghost by The Shondes on loop for several hours (from which I have borrowed the title). [A great song, very queer vibes, would recommend.](https://open.spotify.com/track/6umkslJXYYe7ADiwaJZNz0)

It wasn’t a bad temple. It wasn’t what Velocity would have designed, given her druthers, but it had its charms. She liked the alcoves on the east side of the temple, with their colored glass windows that looked down on the pedestrian walkway below. She liked the space above the ceiling, where you could touch the inside of the roof and be only inches from the rest of the world. She liked the swirls and spikes of the calligraphy cut into the base of the altar.

It wasn’t a bad place to live, but the ‘never leaving’ wore on a person. Even a goddess.

The other temples had icons, elaborate enameled statues of their patron deity. Velocity’s peers, both real and fictional. Velocity’s altar lay bare, a sign of recognition from the builders who constructed this place, back before she’d faded from sight. No point in building an icon for a deity who could preside over her temple in person.

Clearly the language had changed since those olden days; the petitioners who visited lately seemed to misread her inscription as her being a goddess of _lost things_. Less pathetic than the truth, sure, but Velocity hated not being able to help. They’d pour their hearts out over the things their sparks held dear, begging her to bring back their lost possessions and there she was, utterly useless. Unable to leave those four walls, let alone magically locate something.

Sometimes, pure chance or good luck would reunite her petitioners with their beloveds and they’d bring her a gift in thanks. She had quite the motley collection of gifts - innermost energon, sparklings’ toys and lovers’ keepsakes. Sometimes living creatures that she’d wait to set free until the temple was safely empty. But the very best gifts, her treasures, were the books.

And the most beloved of all her treasures was the medical textbook. She’d been offered it by a medical student who had just passed their exams, many years earlier. She’d let herself be seduced by the way they’d spoken of being a medic. Of being able to help people, to reach people...she ignored all the reasons it could never be and buried herself in the textbook. Only when the temple was empty, of course. Nobody had ever tried to take the book, but she worried that if it was away from the safety of the altar amongst her other offerings it might be mistaken for something discarded.

The temple had been empty for hours and she’d thought it’d be safe to snug herself in one of the alcoves by the green windows for a bit of reading. She was immersed in it, trying to memorize the configuration of fuel pumps in the eight provided diagrams, when someone spoke to her.

“Hey, do you mind if I join you?”

Velocity startled, tried to hide the book, tried to look at the person who’d _seen her_ , tried to get gracefully up from her spot by the window - tried to do far too many things at once and ended up losing her footing.

A hand on her shoulder steadied her. She looked up to see a mech watching her with concerned blue optics; a kind face framed in purple helm. “You okay?” They asked. There was literally nobody else they could be talking to.

“Me?” Velocity squeaked.

“Unless the goddess wants to make an appearance,” they joked. “Sorry if I startled you.”

Velocity stammered something about it being fine, mind racing. They could see her? What was that even supposed to mean? She hugged the book to her chest and tried not to stare at them.

“My name’s Nautica. Pronouns are she/her,” Nautica said, offering Velocity a hand...to shake? Velocity went for it, thrilling in the contact of Nautica’s palm against hers. This had to be a dream. She must have fallen asleep and now she was hallucinating beautiful strangers who could see her and wanted to hold her hand.

“Velocity,” she said.

“Like the goddess!” Nautica smiled. “So this really is your perfect hiding place. You don’t mind me intruding, do you? My amica has been driving me mad about joining this choreographed water dance routine and I simply cannot. I figured if I was temporarily...unavailable, just until auditions are over, she’d get over the idea. Firestar hates these places, the old temples. She doesn’t like the inexplicable.”

“I wasn’t aware water dance routines were a thing,” Velocity said.

“Up and coming, apparently. Going to be very fashionable.”

Velocity would have liked to see something like that. It sounded pretty. “Well, I’m just reading, plenty of space if you want to hide here,” she said. “I wouldn’t mind.”

“Thanks Velocity. It’s nice to meet a fellow reader,” Nautica said, smiling. “I have this great book on orthography changes in the colonies I’ve been planning to dig into. I’ll leave you to it, then?”

“Oh, sure,” Velocity stammered, watching as Nautica slipped into the alcove next to her. She sat back down, back to the window and tried to calm down enough to stop shaking. This had to be a dream. She tried to go back to her reading, but the words slipped through her brain like sand in an hourglass.

“Nautica?” Someone called from the street outside.

“Frag it,” Nautica hissed. “Firestar, why can’t you just let this go?”

Velocity looked at her book, then at the door. She bit her lip. She hadn’t had a chance to be impulsive in thousands of years.

She got up and walked round to the other alcove, where Nautica had buried her face in her arms. One blue optic peeked above her arms as Velocity offered her a hand.

“Come on, you need a better hiding place,” Velocity said.

“Where?” Nautica asked. “This whole place is too busy being ascetic and barren to have any good hiding places. I was hoping she wouldn’t come anywhere near here.” Firestar called her name again and Nautica’s shoulders jerked up, as if she could hunch down far enough to disappear entirely from view.

“I know a place,” Velocity said. “Trust me.” She tucked her medical textbook under her arm and jerked her head back towards the altar.

Nautica looked skeptical, but she took her hand and let Velocity lead her back behind the altar. The stairs up into the ceiling above were quite cleverly concealed in the glass tiles, but if you pressed on the right one...the inset toeholds slid back. Velocity glanced over and was startled by Nautica’s smile, huge in excitement. “Velocity is this a _secret room_?” 

“Guess so,” Velocity said. She climbed up and pushed aside the ceiling panel, slipping up into the dark space above. Nautica followed her but, less practiced at the transition from ladder to landing, needed Velocity’s help to make it up into the space. She flopped on top of Velocity, frame shaking in what took Velocity a long panicked moment to realize was silent laughter.

Velocity rolled out from under her, pressing a shushing finger to her lips as she pressed the release tile to conceal the ladder again and slid the ceiling tile back into place. Beneath them, the doors opened and footsteps echoed against the stone floor.

“Nautica? Javelin told me she saw you in the temple district...really Nautica? How immature can you be?”

Velocity did not like this mech, she decided. How dare she bother Nautica? Sweet, beautiful, wonderful Nautica...their optics met and Nautica grinned at her. Velocity felt like she had something warm in her chest, like a volcano.

Below them, Firestar gave up in a huff and stalked out. Nautica waited until the door was safely closed behind her, then broke into genuine laughter. “That was amazing, Velocity,” she said. “How did you even know this was here? Velocity. _Velocity_. How have I never met you before? You’re amazing.” Nautica smiled at her.

* * *

“So when do you think you’re going to sit for your exams?” Nautica asked.

Velocity flinched. Nautica couldn’t have missed it, laying sprawled across Velocity’s lap because she was ‘too tired from water choreography to keep her head up’.

Nautica put her book down. “You’re doing all this work and you’re not even going to take the exams?”

“I don’t...I’m not built to be a medic, Nautica. Just look at me,” Velocity said feebly.

“I know you’re not a Functionist hardliner, Velocity. Caminus isn’t Cybertron - you don’t need to have been forged red to practice medicine.”

“I know but I’m not...I’ve been studying for years and I can barely remember names for the tensor bands in the fingers. I’m not good at tests Nautica.”

Nautica frowned at her. “You’ve been studying for _years_ for an exam you don’t plan to ever take? Why are you studying then?”

“Why do you study all your stuff?” Velocity asked with a shrug. “You planning on actually becoming a quantum engineer and a novelist and a linguist and an interior lighting designer?”

“I am going to become _something_ where I get to lift off from this rock and go see the universe,” Nautica declared. “Quantum engineer? Maybe. I’m reading because I enjoy reading, Velocity but you...don’t. Which is fine! Not everyone needs to love reading, I just don’t get it.”

“I can’t...I don’t want to talk about this Nautica. I’m sorry.” Velocity shimmied her legs out from under Nautica’s shoulders and stood up. She looked around at the temple, but there was nowhere to run. She started for the western wall, where the blue-green alcove windows faced the blank wall of the temple next door. Where there was no view of possible escape.

“Velocity,” Nautica said. She sounded hurt, but what was Velocity supposed to say? _’Sorry, I’m a goddess and I’m trapped in my own temple because I’m not even smart enough to navigate the space between worlds, let alone a medical exam?’_ Nautica was the best thing to ever happen to her. Velocity had been waiting months for this inevitable confrontation, where she had to justify never leaving the temple...she’d been waiting but no good explanation had ever come to mind except the truth. And the truth would ruin everything.

“I have a life, outside of us,” Velocity said bitterly. “I have responsibilities. And I can’t just drop them all to be a medic.”

“What life?” Nautica asked. “What do you do? I’ve never seen you anywhere but here, nobody I ask has ever heard of you.”

There was nothing she could say. She shook her head. “Just go, Nautica. Go home.”

“I’m just trying to help!” Nautica insisted, reaching out to grab Velocity’s wrist. “Come on, we can swing by the examination building, I’m sure there’s no reason you can’t -”

“I can’t!” Velocity screamed. The walls seemed to shake around her and Nautica stepped back, releasing Velocity’s arm wordlessly. She’d never seen that expression on Nautica’s face before. Fear. “Just leave me alone, Nautica.”

* * *

Without Nautica, the temple seemed so much smaller. Velocity replayed the moment on loop, unable to get the fear in Nautica’s optics out of her mind. The solid sound of the door closing behind her.

The supplicants couldn’t see her, they couldn’t hear her, but she felt compelled to talk to them anyway. Like she was a young goddess again, railing against the unfairness of it all until she’d reduced herself to tears.

She couldn’t bear to watch them, optics focused somewhere beyond her head, supplications rolling steadily through her words. She couldn’t bear it and so she crawled into the farthest reaches of the space above the ceiling, where she didn’t have to see anything at all.

The thin ceiling panels did little to muffle the sound. When a supplicant entered, the door grated in its hinges and she cringed away. Their footsteps on the sound boomed, so much like Nautica’s steps when she’d fled the temple. The supplicant stopped at the altar, then paused.

“Orthography is the study of how a written language is represented. In the texts, you can see how the graphemes used on Caminus drifted from traditional Cybertronian graphemes. How the grammar shifted as the populations isolated themselves.” 

That was Nautica’s voice. Clear as a professional orator. Directed to seemingly no one in particular, could have only been meant for only one person.

“The writings in books describe Velocity as the Goddess of Lost Things, a minor deity who helps reunite the foolish with their misplaced possessions. Too many minor deities to catalog accurately, I guess, because everyone cites the same translator on that description. And, honestly, Velyn of Aramma couldn’t translate for _shit_.”

Nautica’s footsteps carried her to the left side of the altar, where the inscription started. She paused for a moment, then began again. “ _Here, encloses the home of the lost goddess, Velocity. She, who loved too much to leave the world of the living, who was tied too deeply to life to ascend beyond. She who waits for love to pull her back home._. The pronouns and possessives were written differently, back then. An easy mistake to make, if you were trying to survey hundreds of temples in a couple of months.”

Nautica waited, then sighed. “Do I have to come up there? Or are you willing to come down, goddess?”

Velocity hugged her knees to her chest and tried to muffle her crying against her shoulder. 

When the ceiling panel shifted aside the blue light of the lower chamber spilled in around Nautica’s shoulders. She looked at Velocity and her optics softened. They were exactly the color of the window glass downstairs, how had Velocity never realized that before?

“Oh, Velocity,” Nautica crawled across the low space, laid a hand on Velocity’s shoulder. It was warm, the steady thrum of her spark so intense under her plating that Velocity felt like she was drowning in it. “I’m a right fool, aren’t I? Mysterious woman nobody’s ever seen, who shares a name with the goddess of the temple. And here I’ve been, complaining about being trapped on Caminus while you’ve been trapped here.”

“I don’t...I didn’t...I liked hearing you complain,” Velocity ended lamely.

Nautica smiled. “Well that’s a relief.”

“Why did you come back?” Velocity asked.

“Lotty, talk about missing something right in front of you. Lotty, I’m in love with you.”

“Me?” Velocity squeaked.

“I mean, I understand that you’re a goddess and I’m just...me. But you’re the first person who I’ve ever felt a connection to, the first person who’s seen Nautica, plain old Nautica, and seemed to think there was something special about her. We don’t fit in here but we fit together. Once I realized who you were and I started working on that translation, I thought that you must not return my feelings - it sounds like something should _happen_ if you loved me back. But I had to tell you anyway, I couldn’t leave things off like that.”

“But you can’t be in love with me, I’d know!”

“You know now?” Nautica suggested.

Velocity thought that over and decided the rest of her complaints could wait.

She rolled up onto her heels and threw her arms around Nautica’s shoulders, burying her face in Nautica’s neck. “You love me?”

“How many times do I have to say it, Velocity? Do I have to go back downstairs and carve it into the altar to make it real to you? I read a book on stone carving once - ”

Velocity leaned up, brushing their cheeks together, pushing her helm against Nautica’s. “You’ve read a lot of books, Nautica.”

Nautica flushed. “I suppose I have.”

“Have you ever read any romances?” Velocity asked, nuzzling against her.

“Um - a couple. I didn’t want to be an elitist, dismissing a genre without ever trying it myself…a lot of the criticisms of romances come from that older warrior school of thought that romantic attachments were a form of weakness because they supplanted the bond between commander and soldier - ”

“Nautica, you adorable nerd, I’m trying to ask you to kiss me.”

“ _Oh._ ”

Nautica seemed too startled by the suggestion to follow though, so Velocity decided to take the lead. She brushed her lips across Nautica’s cheek until she found the tender plating of her mouth. Her medical text had said there was nothing special about the neural circuitry of the mouth, that “romantic rituals” focused there only because of a slightly increased density in signal receptors. The lady who’d written that had clearly never kissed Nautica and, Primus, she was missing out. It was like sinking into something warm, like being wrapped tight in a never-ending feeling of being welcomed. It was like being _loved_.

“I’ve changed my mind,” Velocity whispered. “I don’t want to leave. I want to stay here and kiss you forever.”

“Come home with me,” Nautica replied. “I want to kiss you under the stars. I want to see you become a medic. I want to give you the whole world.”

“In a bit?” Velocity asked.

Nautica laughed. “Whatever you want, goddess.”

“I want you to kiss me again.”

**Author's Note:**

> I may go back through this and edit for typos, but I was so excited to have it done 😄
> 
> As always, I love comments and you can find me online @notwhelmedyet. Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed 💕


End file.
